A Deformation Robust ISAR Image Satellite Target Recognition Method Based on PT-CCNN

To tackle the inherent unknown deformation (e.g., translation, rotation and scaling) of the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images, a deep polar transformer-circular convolutional neural network, i.e., PT-CCNN, is proposed to achieve deformation robust ISAR image automatic target recognition (ATR) in this article. Inspired by human visual system and canonical coordinate of Lie-groups, we adopt a polar transformer module to transform the deformation ISAR images to the log-polar representations, before which a conventional convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized to predict the origin of log-polar transformation. The above techniques make the proposed network invariant to translation, and equivariant to rotation and scaling. On this basis, for the log-polar representations with wrap-around structure, a circular convolutional neural network (CCNN) is further applied to extract more effective and highly discriminative features and improve recognition accuracy. The proposed network is end-to-end trainable with a classification loss, and could extract deformation-robust and essential features automatically. For multiple practical ISAR image datasets of six satellites, the performance testing and comparison experiments demonstrate that the techniques utilized in PT-CCNN are effective, and our proposed network achieve higher recognition accuracy than those previous common methods based on deep learning. For instance, our proposed PT-CCNN beats traditional CNN on rotation, scaling and practical deformation datasets by 24.5-49.3%, 9.0-40.8% and 22.3-26.7%. And it also outperforms the polar CNN without using the above techniques on rotation, scaling and practical deformation datasets by 9.2-53.7%, 5.2-54.6% and 9.0-49.9%. Additionally, the presented visualization results show the abilities and advantages of our method in terms of handling image deformation and extracting effective features.